So where were we? Oh, yeah: Alice escapes from prison (naked, of course — it must be written in Milla Jovovich’s contract), and comes back out into a world now increasingly populated by zombies. (Or, more properly, “the infected.”) The virus, it seems, has now spread across the planet. So has accelerated desertification, apparently, which makes little sense, but I suppose it’s appropriately apocalyptic. (It’s obviously a narrative ploy to justify filming in the desert — in particular, the film’s disappointing set piece of Las Vegas half-buried in sand — but hey, we’ve all been asked to swallow greater improbabilities.)

The desert setting works, though, and not just because it allows Jovovich to pair brown leather garters with shorts and a tan duster. Resident Evil: Extinction does away with the dark claustrophobia of the previous two films, where it seemed that the contagion was mostly isolated. This installment feels airier, almost, and it’s a tacit acknowledgment that the Resident Evil series was never really about horror in the first place — one genre that thrives in darkness — but about action. The brightness of the desert light simply works better for kicking ass.

Where the Title Comes From.

"Attempting to burrow and disappear into the admiration of certain works of art, I tried to make such deep and pure identification that my integrity as a human self would become optional, a vestige of my relationship to the art. I wanted to submit and submerge, even to die a little. I developed a preference, among others, for art that required endurance, that mimicked a galactic endlessness and wore out the nonbelievers. By ignoring my hunger or my need to use the bathroom during a three-hour movie by Kubrick or Tarkovsky, I'd voted against my body, with its undeniable pangs and griefs, in favor of a self composed of eyeballs and brain, floating in the void of pure art." ---- Jonathan Lethem, "The Beards"